A Lonely Adolescent Summer, Set to “Bad Moon Rising”

Illustration by Max-o-matic; Source photographs from Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Songs of Summer, a series on music and memory.Any time is a good time to grow up if you find what you love, but there was something special about coming to self-consciousness in the mid-sixties, amid the British Invasion and the rise of Motown. I got hooked on rock early, when I was six—in 1964, in Queens, at the onset of Beatlemania—thanks to a friend in my building who, like his cool older sister, had a pocket-sized radio, so my father took me to Radio Row (the electronics district in lower Manhattan that was wiped out to make way for the World Trade Center) to get me one, too. Top Forty music (though nobody I knew called it that then) was the soundtrack of my life for the rest of the decade, as it seemingly was for the world at large, because that was the meaning of the rock revolution—the making of a new mainstream. That’s why my millennial children listen to that sixty-year-old music now, whereas, in 1964, only a precocious Mahler buff would have listened to the music of 1904.

I soon started buying records (45s, which had an A-side and a B-side—the intended hit and the throwaway that was sometimes just as good): lots of Beatles to start, but also other artists’ work, including “The Name Game,” “Downtown,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Satisfaction,” “Love Potion Number Nine,” “Look of Love,” “The Game of Love” (looks like I was getting a whole lotta love). Thanks to radio—New York’s 77 WABC—I heard and loved many more songs than I could buy, and what I got from this wide and wild spectrum of collective liberation was an aesthetic education, a sense of style that took far deeper root than did anything I was finding in books or movies. These songs evoked worlds of experience then beyond my ken, and did so in ways that, in retrospect, seem distinctly cinematic, from film noir (“I Fought the Law,” “Summer in the City”) to neo-Westerns (“King of the Road”), from spiky low-budget independent films (“You Really Got Me”) to European art films (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”), from comedy (“Wooly Bully”) to surrealism (“Red Rubber Ball”) to a real-time freakout hallucination (“Pictures of Matchstick Men”). Meanwhile, a prodigious weekly outpouring of masterworks from Motown laid the groundwork for my teen-age love of jazz.

Rock was endless summer: heat and sunshine came through my radio all year long, but I didn’t have a song of the summer until 1969. We’d just moved to a Long Island suburb, where I hadn’t yet set foot in the school, and meeting other kids casually was almost impossible, because the development was planned not for walking but for driving. In our old neighborhood, everyone just went outside; in the suburbs, I learned of the peculiar practice of calling another child on the phone and making an appointment. In any case, I had no one to call. The summer went by in a slow blur at a local pool; I don’t remember what I read or watched, but radios were playing everywhere—at poolside, at home, in the car—and the song that I made mine was “Bad Moon Rising,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.